Finding your way around in an installshield project XML file
We still use InstallShield MP 5.x and I find the lack of search functionality in the GUI very hindering (I don't if this is still the case with the newer 10.x and 11.x releases), so I use Vim to do all my searching and find the beans etc. and go back to the GUI to locate them. This by itself provides a huge benefit, but it is often not sufficient in a huge project, because you still don't know how to locate it in the GUI. My solution for sometime was to set 'foldmethod' to "indent" and after searching for the bean, carefully open the folds up one by one and locate the parents (this works because the beans are indented nicely by their level in the bean tree). Once you reach to the top most bean (under the root), you get an idea how to locate it, which solved the problem, but I still felt that it is a bit tedious to do this (especially because of the several folds you need to open up keeping track of the cursor position). My new solution to this problem is still using folds, but in a different way (you need Vim 6.3). The displayName property of the beans is what we are interested in to locate the bean, so I create an outline of the entire bean structure using the following command (you need , and and ): FoldMatching "displayName" -1 This creates folds just the way I want, but provides no way to navigate the bean structure, so here is a function to take advantage of the fact that the XML is nicely indented, and find the parent bean: " This function is useful in an InstallShield XML project file to find the " parent bean of the current bean. Call this function after creating folds " using the following command: " FoldMatching "displayName" -1 " This assumes that the beans are indented based on their depth in the bean " tree (which is the case for at least InstallShield MP 5.x) function! FoldMoveToParentNode() normal! zc let curNodeIndent = indent(foldclosed('.')) let nodeIndent = curNodeIndent let curLine = line('.') let line = -1 while nodeIndent >= curNodeIndent " Move to the upper fold. normal! zkzc let line = line('.') if line curLine " No more folds break endif let nodeIndent = indent(foldclosed('.')) endwhile endfunction Put the above function in your vimrc along with installing the required plugins that I mentioned above, and optionally create a mapping: nnoremap \fdp :call FoldMoveToParentNode() Here are the concise steps to locate beans: * Execute the below command: :FoldMatching "displayName" -1 * Search for the bean name or any others that you are interested in (like a filename or command being executed). This will position the cursor on the fold that the matching line is part of (vim might automatically open the fold, depending on your 'foldopen' setting): /\.ear * Now execute the above function (or the map) multiple times until you reach the parent that is familiar to you: :call FoldMoveToParentNode() I find this very handy to quickly navigate in an installshield MP project (especially when it is unfamiliar), and I hope that others also find it useful. Comments